Posts Tagged ‘Workplace’

Are you a corporate athlete? According to Gail Golden, Principal at Gail Golden Consulting LLC, a corporate athlete is an executive in a high-level role who faces many of the challenges, stresses and constraints that celebrity professional athletes also face. In a recent interview for the Alter+Care Inspire Podcasts. Golden says corporate athletes often high-energy people, but more importantly they know how to focus on an idea, direct it and deploy it to reach their maximum effectiveness.

Golden’s thinking was influenced by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, authors of the book “Power of Full Engagement.” Loehr and Schwartz were coaches who worked with world-class athletes who were no longer at peak performance, determining where they had gone wrong and how to help them return to peak performance. In the process, they discovered that some of these practices could also help corporate athletes. By concentrating on returning to high energy levels and getting a sense of meaning and significance in their lives, corporate athletes can once again deliver consistent peak performance.

Golden also addresses effective work habits. In terms of multi-tasking, research suggests that it is not very effective – whether the individual is 25 or 75. According to Golden, people can successfully perform two tasks at once if they are different from each other. People are far more effective when they work on one task for five or 10 minutes and then switch to another for an equal period of time.

High-powered leaders are often also slightly delusional. “Highly effective and happy people are often more optimistic than reason should allow,” she says. Although a completely rational person knows that the road ahead often is bumpy, the most effective corporate leaders grasp that these things are a part of life and take them as they come.

To listen to Gail Golden’s full interview on achieving peak performance in the workplace, click here.

People who can’t sleep at night tend not to consider their problem to be an illness that requires treatment, or a good reason to call in sick. That mindset could hurt employers and employees by making insomniacs drag themselves to work and sleepwalk through the day, according to a new study. Researchers surveyed 7,428 employed people and found that 23 percent experienced some form of insomnia — such as difficulty falling asleep or waking up during the night — at least three times a week during the previous month, for at least one-half hour at a time. It should come as no surprise that these sleep problems carry over to their jobs. Insomniacs were no more likely than their coworkers who slept well to miss work, but were so consistently tired that they cost their employers the equivalent of 7.8 days of work in lost productivity every year — an amount equal to an average of roughly $2,280 in salary per person. That adds up to $63.2 billion (and 252.7 workdays) for the entire nation.

The majority of study participants did not physically miss work as a result of insomnia, said lead author Ronald Kessler, Ph.D., a psychiatric epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. They frequently show up too tired to perform their job effectively (a phenomenon known as “presenteeism”). “Employers these days want their workers to stay home if they’re sick. If they know you’re absent, they can at least find ways to fill in for you,” Kessler said. “But you can’t stay home every day if you’re chronically sleep deprived, so these people get in the habit of going to work and then not performing.”

According to Kessler, “It’s an underappreciated problem. Americans are not missing work because of insomnia. They are still going to their jobs but accomplishing less because they’re tired. In an information-based economy, it’s difficult to find a condition that has a greater effect on productivity.”

Fully 23 percent of employees were estimated to have insomnia; that statistic was verified by sleep medicine experts, who independently evaluated a sub-sample of the study group. Researchers also found that employees aged over 65 are less likely to be insomniacs (14 percent) and that men were less likely (20 percent) to have trouble sleeping than women (27 percent). Because the typical cost of insomnia treatment ranges from $200 annually for a sleep aid to $1,200 per year for behavior modification therapy, the study’s author believes that screening and treating workers’ sleep issues may be worthwhile for employers.

Donna Arand, Ph.D., a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, says the study underlines a problem that is well recognized by sleep specialists. “What struck me most about the study was the fact that workers really weren’t calling in sick,” she says. “People with chronic insomnia are going to work but they aren’t functioning at their maximum. We all experience this from time to time, but for people with insomnia it could be happening every day. One of the most important things is to try to get up at the same time every day and go to bed at the same time every night, even on the weekends. Routine is the key.”

People can be described as insomniacs when they have trouble sleeping for at least a month. The causes can be alcoholism, anxiety, coffee, and stress; it can also result from medical conditions like depression. The more insomniacs think about getting enough sleep, the more stressed they become, and that results in even less sleep.

“Now that we know how much insomnia costs the American workplace, the question for employers is whether the price of intervention is worthwhile,” Kessler said. “Can U.S. employers afford not to address insomnia in workplace?”

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